We’ve launched the first round of the survey. If you are part of an organization that is collecting or documenting COVID, click here to fill it out. If you’d like more information about this project, please email covid.collections@nyu.edu.
About the Project
The COVID Collections Project is a collaboration among the Initiative for Critical Disaster Studies (NYU Gallatin), the Archives and Public History Program (NYU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences), and the E.L. Quarantelli Resource Collection at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center.
As COVID-19 began to dominate the global agenda during the spring of 2020, museums, libraries, and archives around the world announced efforts to document human experiences of illness, isolation, economic downturn, fear, adaptation, and solidarity. These efforts ranged widely in scale and methods, from local historical societies seeking personal reflections to large scale federally-funded oral history projects. What will become of these various collecting efforts, and how will scholars be able to locate them effectively?
This project seeks to catalogue these ongoing COVID-19 documentation projects in an effort to enable these collections to be surfaced and described in ways that increase access and use. Expanding access to and use of collections are core values of many cultural heritage professions, but it can be a challenge to establish links between collections and interested scholars. This separation, combined in this case with the number of COVID-related collections being created simultaneously around the world, has created a need for resources that can not only help scholars identify primary source collections relevant to their work, but also create the descriptive metadata that make the contents of these collections legible to researchers.
The first phase of the project, currently underway, will identify and survey collecting institutions and individuals about their projects, and identify specific digital humanities tools and practices to use in building an eventual COVID Collections website.
If you have questions, you can email covid.collections@nyu.edu.
Personnel
Valerie Marlowe is the Assistant Director for Archives and Collections at the Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware, where she directs the E.L. Quarantelli Resource Collection. Her research and practical work primarily focuses on the ways disaster-related archives, collections, and other forms of cultural heritage are created and maintained, and what “big picture” organizational processes influence the assembly and stewardship of these important collections.
Ellen Noonan is Clinical Associate Professor of History and Director of the Archives and Public History Program at New York University. Prior to coming to NYU in 2016 she worked for nearly two decades at the American Social History Project (CUNY), where she led and contributed to numerous digital public history and history education projects. Her Historians Respond to COVID-19 website is among the inspirations for this COVID Collections project.
Jacob Remes is Clinical Associate Professor of History in New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he directs the Initiative for Critical Disaster Studies. Trained as a labor and working-class historian of the United States and Canada, he is the co-editor, with Andy Horowitz, of Critical Disaster Studies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) and author of Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (University of Illinois Press, 2016).
Scott Knowles is Professor in the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). A historian of disaster worldwide, he focuses on the historical processes that make disasters possible, and the application of history to reduce future disasters. Since March of 2020 Knowles has hosted #COVIDCalls every weekday, a live podcast discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic. He is publication series co-editor (with Kim Fortun) of “Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster” with the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Eric Anderson is a Ph.D. candidate in History at New York University. He studies Latin America during the twentieth century, and his dissertation focuses on the cultural history of Amazonian Ecuador. Prior to attending NYU, Eric worked on research projects at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he started developing the skills and interest in digital humanities.
Seulgi Lee is an incoming Master’s student in the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). Her research interests include disaster, urban regeneration, memorial and feminism. Her current research includes the Sewol ferry disaster memorial and urban regeneration after the Pohang Earthquake.
Cornelia Posch is a Ph.D. Student in the University of Delaware’s Disaster Science and Management program, where she works as a research assistant in the Disaster Research Center’s E.L. Quarantelli Resource Collection. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Romance Studies/Italian Language and Literature from the University of Vienna, Austria, and a Master of Arts degree in Library and Information Science from Humboldt-University of Berlin, Germany. In more than five years at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institute for Art History research library in Rome, Italy, Cornelia developed her interest and skills in emergency preparedness in libraries and the related fields of conservation and preservation. Her current research explores the broader field of cultural heritage and its contributions to community resilience and Disaster Risk Reduction.
Matthew Van is an incoming Ph.D. student in the University of Delaware’s Disaster Science and Management program. Hailing from Orange County, California, Matthew is a current graduate student at California State University, Long Beach in emergency services administration, and his background includes biology, public affairs, and medical sciences. Some of the research topics he has previously explored involve the effects of COVID-19 on social safety net organizations, and variances in public health pandemic policies across different countries.
Lia Warner is an incoming dual degree Master’s student at NYU’s Archives and Public History program and LIU’s Library and Information Science program. She graduated in 2021 from NYU Gallatin, where she concentrated on labor, feminism, and urbanism within the context of modern Chinese history and literature. Lia has been a worker at the NYU Special Collections since 2018. She plans to become an archivist or academic librarian. Lia is excited to work on the COVID Collections Project because of her interest in archives, history, their relationship, and the ways in which archivists and historians might inform the development and preservation of collective memory.
Eileen Young is a Ph.D. student in the University of Delaware’s Disaster Science and Management program. She holds a Master of Science in Disaster Science and Management from the University of Delaware, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Liberal Studies from the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. Her research interests include collective behavior, resilience in vulnerable populations, and the evolving role of computing and big data in social science. Ongoing projects include researching social factors in evacuation from fire and wrangling data related to FEMA’s evolving roles in the COVID-19 response.
Funding
COVID Collections is supported by a Digital Humanities Seed Grant from the NYU Humanities Center, with additional support from the E.L. Quarantelli Resource Collection at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center. The project grows out of the Historical Approaches to COVID-19 Working Group, which includes historians and archivists working in and on five continents and was funded by the National Science Foundation through the Social Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER) Network and the CONVERGE facility at the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder (NSF Award #1841338).